AND
Monday at noon Twitter users noticed a change to the tagging policy. The social media platform began branding a group of public media as affiliated with the Cuban government
and the label itself appeared in messages sent or shared from any individual account that had a link to those posts’ websites. On Tuesday, Facebook closed a score of profiles of alleged supporters of the Cuban revolution, but left hundreds that publish homemade bomb manuals, call to burn police stations, announce armed expeditions, disclose private data for political hitmen, threaten and generally insult from foreign accounts.
As if waging an online video game war, US platforms have decided this week to aim their laser sights at the quadrant of Cuba to mark and silence characters
from an enemy who has no way to defend himself.
Some might argue that it’s honorable to be labeled a government vehicle for public financing, and it certainly is. But Twitter does not intend to exalt Granma, CubadebateRadio Havana Cuba, Rebel Youth and others, but to reduce the spread of their messages. Without prior notice and wildly, the transnational has extended its control policies to the Caribbean, the rush to erase uncomfortable voices, the hypocritical correction of its community norms and, once again, it exercises censorship on a global scale, simply by tweaking its algorithms and without the procedures that would justify those decisions. To top it off, it considers private media to be impartial and more genuine than its publicly funded counterparts, so anything on the Twitter planet that smacks of private interest is label-free. In this biased view, users have no right to judge content on its merits.
But the biggest absurdity of all this is that it is a corporation linked to the United States government like Twitter that labels others as affiliate media
to a state. It’s not hard to find evidence that the platform has worked in increasing intimacy with the White House since US politicians began pushing tech companies to regulate content. In a 2011 legal appeal easily found online, Twitter settled with the Federal Trade Commission implement, monitor and adjust your security measures
under government observation and has since handed over the data of thousands of users to government agencies.
Magazine Forbes published in August that the United States tops the list of governments that require the delivery of data to technology platforms, with almost 2 million user accounts assigned since 2013. In the elections that brought Biden to the White House, Twitter was a of the many Silicon Valley corporations that have acknowledged working directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be removed in order to secure
the electoral contest.
Every time Twitter reports that it has purged thousands of accounts suspected of inauthentic behavior and acting under the direction of foreign governments, they will never be accounts from NATO countries or other friends of the US government, and it doesn’t take much imagination to explain. the cause. The sanctioned favorites are Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, of course.
On May 12, 2020, the platform blocked 526 profiles managed from the island. He did not explain his decision to users who saw their accounts abruptly terminated, but the next day, on May 13, Michael Kozak, then Acting Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, told reporters that the State Department had identified more than four dozen Cuban accounts
that violated Twitter’s policies—announced by the government agency, not the super company! Independent
private company!-. almost simultaneously, Miami Herald published statements from another official about the progress of relations with Twitter: We have an ongoing dialogue with tech companies and are working with them to share our insights on attempts by state and non-state actors to leverage their platforms to spread disinformation and propaganda.
said Lea Gabrielle, director of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), also at the State Department.
Facebook’s history as a media outlet affiliated with the US government is even darker and well known. I cite as a sample button the scandal carried out in 2021 by the then spokeswoman for the White House, Jen Psaki, who told journalists that the Executive compiled lists of people who publish content on that platform troublesome
so that Facebook can remove them
. Journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Interceptreacted angrily: Union of corporate and state power, one of the classic hallmarks of fascism
. Greenwald was talking about Facebook, but this could be a great tag to hang on Twitter as well.
